14 October 2011 10:54 AM

Revd DR PETER MULLEN: Socialist calories

Here is the news we’ve all been waiting to hear. It is announced – by our so-called government – that men may now be allowed an extra fifty-five calories each day, and women an extra one hundred and thirty-nine.

The first thing that strikes me about this particular piece of odious idiocy is its fastidious precision: the ladies, you notice, are allowed one hundred and thirty-nine extra calories – not one hundred and thirty-eight or one hundred and forty. I suppose if one fat lady were to eat an extra one hundred and forty-one calories, it would kill her, or at least make her unfit to be in charge of a bicycle.

Ah but this is only the bare bones, so to speak. I must be more precise. Professor Terence Stephenson, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said that the permitted increase amounts to “sixteen dry-roasted peanuts per day per person.” Nuts to you too, Prof.

What we should notice about this tosh is that it is all the result of constant and diligent research by “a government advisory committee” over many years. In other words, people are actually being paid to make these assessments and declare ex cathedra the exact amounts we should be permitted to eat. And, if they are being paid, then we the tax-paying public are paying them. And there I was thinking we’re in the depths of economic crisis when we all ought to be cutting out needless expenditure. Can you think of anything less needful for the national well-being than a committee of health professionals talking nuts?

Well, it is laughable and so I suppose the polite thing to do is to enjoy the joke. Except it isn’t a joke. It is an example of control-freakery, to be more accurate of statism – that is of the mindset which has dominated western culture for the last seventy years or so that the government knows best.

They admitted it themselves in the 1940s when they created that great white elephant the NHS and spoke about interfering with our lives “from the cradle to the grave.”

“Take no thought for what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink.“ said the Lord Jesus Christ. But our socialist establishment knows better than the Son of God and insists we eat five pieces of fruit and vegetables each day and that we don’t drink more than what amounts to the whiff of the barmaid’s apron.

So long as we don’t break the law, what the hell has it to do with the government how we live our lives? I thought we were supposed to be living in a free country – which must mean, at least, that everyone is at liberty to go to hell in his own way.

The reality is that there are highly-funded quangos – what about that “bonfire of the quangos” you promised us, Dave? – which seek to regulate every aspect, of our daily lives. And behold the days will come when no man may scratch his own bum, but must apply (with the appropriate documentation) to the commissar for bum-scratching who will come round and do the job for him.

I had hoped that necessity, in the form of the economic crisis, would at last persuade us that the nanny state – actually, the iron fist of corporatist control – would be abandoned. Instead it gets worse. The only way Dave proposes to set alight the bonfire of the quangos is by setting up another, larger, quango to oversee the pretended conflagration.

The abolition of state socialism is the first essential step to our economic recovery – and, even more importantly, to the restoration of common sense and decency in public life.